Prof. Zachary Wallmark - Class of 1960 Music Lecture

Professor Zachary Wallmark of University of Oregon offers a Class of 1960 Lecture titled Authentic, idiosyncratic, or enchanted? Three ideologies of timbre in popular music.

Musicians go to great lengths to achieve certain qualities of sound that their audiences value. What are these values? How are they embodied? Why? In this talk, I explore three ideological orientations toward timbre that covertly shape the discourse of meaning and value in American popular music. Illustrated with case studies, I argue that timbre often works (1) as authentication (proof of belonging), (2) idiosyncrasy (mark of individual uniqueness), and (3) enchantment (fetishization of totemic objects). First, I explore the world of old-time fiddling, where a “scratchy” tone is considered an aural watermark of folk identity. Second, I examine the idiosyncratic vocal techniques of rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who uses a unique and instantly identifiable vocable (the vowel [æ] with vocal fry) as a timbre trademark of her brand persona. Finally, I turn to the “Mellotron war,” an ongoing conflict in the vintage gear community over whether the digital Mellotron adequately captures the quirky enchantment of the analog original (a tape-based keyboard sampler from the 1960s and ‘70s).

Zachary Wallmark is a musicologist with an interest in popular music, timbre, and music cognition. Prior to his appointment at UO, Wallmark served on the music faculty at Southern Methodist University, where he also held a courtesy appointment in psychology. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on American popular music history and analysis, music and emotion, film music, hip-hop, timbre, music and politics, and opera, among other topics.

Working at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and musicology, Wallmark’s research seeks to account for the role of musical timbre (tone) in emotional response, aesthetic judgment, and music sociology, particularly in the context of post-1945 American popular music. His book Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge (Oxford, 2022) explores the slippery psychoacoustic and social fault lines separating perceptions of musical timbre from “noise,” with reception case studies drawn from free jazz, extreme heavy metal, and traditional Japanese music. Wallmark’s work has been published in both musicological and scientific journals, including Emotion, Ethnomusicology Review, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Perception, Music & Science, Music Theory Online, Psychology of Music, and Psychomusicology. He is also coeditor (with Robert Fink and Melinda Latour) of the award-winning volume, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford, 2018).

Wallmark’s research has been profiled in the national news media, including Newsweek, Psychology Today, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. He is active in the Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) group, an international research partnership funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His work has also been supported by the NEH and the GRAMMY Museum Foundation. Wallmark has presented at numerous international conferences including the AMS, ICMPC, SMT, SMPC, and SEM. He was an invited public lecturer at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and the Soluna International Arts Festival. In addition to his academic work, Wallmark is a published composer, commercial musician, jazz bassist, and performer of the Japanese shakuhachi flute.

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